At Stake in the 2012 Elections: U.S. Energy Policy
I often write short, high-level pieces summarizing the pros and cons of the oil economy vs. a transition to renewables, and I like to refer readers to others’ work when I come across articles that I think will resonate. Linked above is a very good one by columnist Sarah van Gelder, co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine: a “national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.”
Republicans may object to her using words like “dirty” and “deadly” to describe the Romney ticket’s energy plan, but, to be fair, we need to admit that the U.S. energy policy is very much at stake in the 2012 elections, and Americans aren’t exactly feelin’ the love from the Republicans vis-à-vis renewable energy and environmental responsibility.
I remember the first evening of a course in existentialism I had 37 years ago this fall, in which I asked the professor, “According to (Nobel prize-winner and existentialist superstar) Albert Camus, ‘suicide is the only valid philosophical question,’ implying that all the work of people like Socrates, Descartes, and so forth is ‘invalid.’ This strikes me as patently wrong. What am I missing here?” Fast-forward to last week, when I began Brian Greene’s 
Those of us who maintain optimism for a future than includes sustainable practices in energy generation place a great deal of hope in “distributed generation” – the concept in which the model of buying electricity from huge utilities becomes increasingly irrelevant, and in which individual users generate more – or all — of their own. Such a schema has many obvious advantages, especially that it encourages renewables; users will not be building their own coal-fired power plants, for example, but they will deploy solar and wind power.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of providing an interview for one of the key researchers of the Germany-based think-tank 
Daniel Yergin, in his book “The Quest”, writes that a critical shift from carbon-based to non-carbon-based fuels has begun, along with a parallel movement towards higher levels of efficiency in industrial processes and energy movement. It seems we are shifting from a mentality of exuberant excess towards one of resource and energy conservation in light of our evolving understanding of ecosystems and health impacts, with a healthy push from markets to hedge against rising fuel costs. Will these critical shifts take place in time, before the oceans fill with toxins, before a gas mask and SPF 2000 will be required for your evening walk? How quickly can we optimize efficiencies? What are the major forces countervailing against this progress and how do we get to where many intelligent and passionate thinkers say we need to be in order to survive?
Oooh, it wasn’t a good day for those of you out there with lungs. But it was an utterly fantastic day for those who are paid to obfuscate the dangers of the emissions of coal-fired power plants. 
